Few months ago, I collaborated with the Girls of War on an interview about Fallout 3 with the game’s lead designer and writer, Emil Pagliarulo. It was an incredible opportunity to finally ask what I had in mind regarding the game’s narrative and its revolving issues. I contributed with the four final questions (9,10, 11, and 12) and opted to focus on morality, character development, real life reflection, and modding; respectively.

Like this:

For the second time, the Writer’s Guild of America is nominating games for its annual Videogame Writing Award. The most famous, or AAA titles, among those are Fallout 3, Tomb Raider: Underworld, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

Sadly though, the selection process requires winners to be members of the Guild. Naturally this reduces drastically the number of contestants and doesn’t account for the majority of games released.

Nevertheless, games are a somewhat recent medium and if the event’s objective is to “encourage storytelling excellence in videogames, improve the status of writers, and foster uniform standards within the gaming industry”; so be it.

As a Bethesda fan and having only played Fallout 3 (at length) from the list, I’ll cross my fingers for it. I’m sure though all of the games contribute to storytelling in their own distinct genre and manner.

Credit goes to the games which did not necessarily come closer to traditional means of storytelling similar to other mediums (like film), but rather found their own voice and method of telling stories.

I would like to see Dead Space and GTA 4 participating as well.

EDIT: Micah Wright commented that actually, the Award rules only require that writers who nominate themselves join the WGA’s sister group, the Videogame Writers Caucus, and don’t need to be members of the Guild per se.